A chance to share the joys and pain – mostly pain – of supporting Leyton Orient

04 February 2017

Leyton Orient 1 Carlisle United 2, 4/2/17

A game which... was preceded by a major selection headache for Orient latest's puppet manager Danny Webb. Namely: could he find 11 players whose registration papers were in order and weren't being frozen out Francesco Becchetti? Thankfully he managed to rustle up a few kids from the local park, a couple of guys who Rob Gagliardi had identified on FM17 and some bloke who'd once almost made it into the five-a-side team of the Stevenage branch of Specsavers.

Incredibly this bunch put up more fight than we've probably seen all season at Brisbane Road. They were still pretty much useless, mind, but God knows it's a big ask for this lot to get us out of the total mess Mr Becchetti has left us in. Still, respect to them for giving it a go and perhaps an infinitesimal glimmer of hope that we won't be relegated.

Today's team

Jump off your seat moment... The moment Gavin Massey scored a goal that wasn't at the time required to be preceded by the word "consolation". To clarify for more recent fans of Leyton Orient: a "goal" – as opposed to a "consolation goal" – is something that was occasionally witnessed at Brisbane Road mostly during the 1970s and in 2013/14. Of course, by the second half Massey's goal had actually become a "consolation goal" and the order of the universe was thus restored.

Give that man a medal... Actually Gavin Massey again for running his socks off and being a constant menace to the ball boys on the side of the pitch and sometimes the Carlisle defence. If we are going to have any chance of staying up we're going to need wily old pros like Massey (24), Tom Parkes (25), Nigel Atangana (27) and Nicky Hunt (58) to stand up and be counted.

Taxi for... Now, it's easy to mock Rowan Liburd's performance today, but let's get some perspective here guys: he's severely lacking match practice. That's because he's evidently never played a football match in his life. Give him time to learn the basics and we could have a 20-goal a man in our 2026/27 season in the Essex Olympian Senior League Premier Division. (Yeah, I did the math.)

In the dug out... It was a curious decision for Danny Webb to turn up to his first match dressed as a Romford estate agent, but fair play to him for trying to patch up the footballing equivalent of a crumbling tenement block that the owner has deliberately set fire to. I mean, Webb has essentially been tasked with saving Orient from relegation not with one hand tied behind his back, but with both hands figuratively chopped off and buried in an Albanian waste dump. If he can pull it off it will count as the greatest Orient managerial feat of all time.

Danny Webb

Meanwhile on Twitter... "The manager explained his decision to me and I respect that" tweeted Alex Cisak in explanation of being dropped not just from the team, but the whole squad. Webb himself claimed that "it's not that Alex has done anything particularly wrong" but that "we have Alex, Charlie Grainger and Sam all going for the number one jersey." Or to put it another way, "We have an international goalkeeper with nearly 200 senior appearances who's pretty much solely responsible for Orient not already being down, and a 20-year-old and 19-year-old with three appearances between them all going for the number one jersey."

So you don't have to be tin-hatted conspiracy nut to infer that transfer-listed Cisak was dropped for something other than footballing reasons, not least because on what planet would you throw an untested teenager into a relegation dogfight in League Two? Or rather, there's not exactly a shortage of evidence of Francesco Becchetti freezing out players and interfering in team affairs.

Not blaming Webb personally - seems like a decent guy and I'd probably buy a property off him - but it's yet another example of the psychopathic mismanagement that stems directly from Francesco Becchetti. It's almost as if the Italian is upset that Donald Trump is getting so much publicity of late so has decided to take his own narcissistic megalomania off the fucking scale in response.

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A disclaimer

The opinions on this Leyton Orient blog are generally based on no actual research. When I write stuff I frequently distort the truth, exaggerate and contradict myself, mostly in an effort to construct tenuous metaphors or to make cheap gags about the players. Sorry about all that.